Here at Fusionary, user experience design, or UX, has been a core tenant of ours from the beginning. It’s wired into our consultative approach and integrated into our process. However, we’ve found that, while many of our clients have heard of UX, they might not understand exactly what it means and how it fits into a project. That’s why we developed this primer on UX services in general, with a few of our user experience philosophies sprinkled in.

UX and Terminology

There are all sorts of terms people use that are related to UX, when they’re talking about UX — UI, experience design, research/CRO, information architecture, usability, customer journey mapping, then there’s the field of CX… It can feel like you need a dictionary to parse through it all. Here’s a brief overview to help you make sense of it.

Let’s start broad: CX stands for customer experience and represents every single touchpoint that a customer has with a brand or organization — from sales conversations all the way through to customer support calls. On the other hand, user experience refers to the specific mode of communication, or a specific interaction someone can have with a brand. We usually design user experiences for websites, apps, and software. Basically, UX is a narrower field than CX.

Next, user experience and experience design are interchangeable terms. Terms like CRO, information architecture, usability, and customer journey mapping all fall under the umbrella of user experience.

However, UX and UI mean different things. UX is more widely focused on the entire user experience, using a particular tool (again, think a website). It’s holistic. In contrast, UI, or user interface, is granular. UI refers to the visual design elements that, put together, can help make up a good — or bad — user experience.

When is UX used?

User experience tends to come up with digitally focused tools — such as ecommerce, one of our particular areas of expertise — but it doesn’t have to be limited to the digital world. It can cover just about anything. Case in point: Our Design Manager & Principal UX Strategist Casey Kloostra was doing laundry the other day and was frustrated by what she felt like was a poor UX decision on behalf of the dryer manufacturer. She was cleaning out the lint trap, but, because of its positioning within the appliance, when she pulled it out, there was no way to keep from getting lint everywhere — including inside the machine, which she then had to clean out, too. If the team who created this dryer had thought about its use and tested its functionality, Casey’s experience could have been better. This is the same principle that we apply to the digital user experience: Thinking about a tool’s uses and testing how it works across those uses.

It’s important to take the time to put care and effort into making sure that what you’re building works for the people you’re building it for, and that you’re building the right thing in the first place. On our end, the UX discovery process also ensures that all of the stakeholders involved in a project are aligned, and that we’re on the same page with everyone on the client team.

How does UX fit into a project?

At Fusionary, UX is our starting point for just about every project. Sometimes we take on strictly development projects (and our development team is strong on its own), but we usually work with clients who are looking for both design and development work. 

Our design process starts with us digging in and asking a bunch of questions. Our goal is to figure out who our clients are, what they need to do, who all of their stakeholders are… essentially, to absorb as much knowledge as possible so that we can make intelligent decisions on a client’s behalf. For many of our clients, there’s also some education involved at this stage. This foundational work can help team members think about how they talk about themselves, their company, their products; what their customers are actually looking for; and what pain points they’ve had.

An example: When the goal of a marketing site is to get users to fill out a contact form, which feels simple enough, the UX process is still helpful. We need to understand what these users are looking for. What is their mindset when they come to the site? Do they know us, or is our site acting as their intro to our organization? What is the path we want them to take to get to the ultimate call to action [CTA]?

UX deliverables can include things like information architecture, user stories, audience personas, segments, and customer journey mapping. Our team determines which of these artifacts makes the most sense for a project depending on the tool that our clients are trying to build and what customers they’re trying to reach.

All of these artifacts then inform visual design — prototypes, mood boards, wireframes, and mockups.

The development team usually begins sketching out their work once the design team has prototypes ready to go; they begin to build after the design team hands off fully fleshed-out mockups.

UX & AI

AI is top-of-mind in just about every industry, and, of course, seeing as we work in tech, we are paying attention to these conversations. And quite a few of our clients are asking about how AI fits into the world of UX.

In many ways, UX is the opposite of artificial intelligence. As we mentioned above, UX is about taking the time and effort to be deliberate about strategic and design decisions. This requires a human touch — human thought, human perspective, human testing. Think of it this way: People are busy. Our lives are crowded and noisy, and our attention is always being pulled in numerous directions at the same time. We respect that. If you’re going to take the time to pull up a website or download an app, we want you to feel that your time is respected by making the entire experience as seamless, and ideally enjoyable, as possible. It’s a win-win for our clients when we deliver on this promise. Happy users are more likely to be return users, repeat buyers, and positive online reviewers. And, unfortunately, AI isn’t great at figuring out how humans want to interact with digital tools. It’s built from algorithms, after all, not human experience.

That said, we have AI to thank for the improvement of CMS tools. For example, built-in A/B testing is amazing, thanks to the power of AI. Analytics felt like a black hole for some people, but now they’re much more usable.

To be clear, we aren’t anti-AI. In fact, we use AI in our daily work, for things like taking notes during video meetings, spurring the idea generation process, jumpstarting prototypes, and usability testing. We also think AI has tons of potential for predicting trends and user behaviors. We simply don’t see AI replacing the human component in user experience design services any time soon, if ever.

Bring us your web design and user experience challenges

We’re passionate about the value and importance of UX. When the user experience is considered, it makes daily life simpler for all of us — because we’re all digital users! — and gives our clients the most effective tool(s) to satisfy both their goals and the goals of their customer base. The holistic thinking that goes into our user experience design services brings a distinctly human touch to each of the beautiful and technically best-in-class assets we create. 

Learn more about how our UX and UI consulting can help guide your brand’s digital transformation by contacting our team today.